Surrealism

In today's lecture we were taught about the artist style surrealism. Artists started surrealism after the first world war to escape reality and the movement is described as moments of psychic intensity and proactive forms of unrestrained convulsive beauty.

Salvador Dali is one of the surrealism greats. The Spanish painter created many works of art such as this one called The Persistence of memory (1931). I love this piece of work because of how unusual it is. The clocks are dripping, as if they are melting and are in such as obscure environment. It is a great example of how bizarre yet interesting surrealism art is. Another example of a surrealism artist is Marcel Duchamp who created this piece of work called Fountain (1917).  I have seen this work in real life at The Pompidou museum in Paris earlier this year. The piece is interesting because it is a mans urinal with writing saying 'R Mutt' on it and that is about it. It is surrealism/Dada but I like it because of how simple it is yet effective. It seems like an odd piece of work to see in an art gallery but that is the point of surrealism, to be different and weird.

Surrealism is not just in paintings and drawings but animation. Dali and Walt Disney collaborated to create a surrealism animation called Dali and Disney Destino. In fact many Disney films include surrealism such as the pink elephants scene in Dumbo, Alice in wonderland and the wizard of oz. This leads us on to the uncanny valley scale made by Masashiro Mori in 1970. Uncanny means something that looks the same but is not or something strange about something familiar and is often more disturbing than surprising. 

This is the scale. In animation, the scale would start with animations such as The Simpsons where you know they are human but are not anatomically correct. The dip in the scale is the uncanny valley where things get lifelike but too lifelike, therefore it becomes creepy. An example of this could be The Polar Express, where the animators tried to make the characters so lifelike that it became creepy because they looked real but something still was not quite right and destroys the illusion of reality. I agree with this scale because I have experienced the feeling of being creeped out my realistic things and prefer animations that are not too lifelike and in the uncanny valley.